Past events of the Group
2010
The Dissenting Voice – A Guide for the Future?
Saturday, 5 June in Belfast.
Guest Speaker will be Dr Éamon Phoenix.
The Annual General Meeting will be held on Saturday 5th June at the Crescent Townhouse Hotel, Botanic Avenue, Belfast.
The business of the AGM will be dealt with from 10.30 until 11.15
The second part of the meeting will be open to the public at 11.30 when we will have as our guest speaker, Dr Éamon Phoenix whose theme will be The Dissenting Voice – A Guide for the Future?
The seminar will look at the impact on society during the past 150 years of those with dissenting voices who stood against prevailing political and religious opinion. Are such voices still relevant in the new political dispensation and if they are how can they be most effective in a modern multi-media society?
13 March:Malachi O’Doherty tells it well. We were hooked a minute into his talk about integrity in public and private life when he took us to west Belfast in the fifties and roads thronged with onlookers awaiting the arrival of Cardinal Conway’s stately convoy and the excitement of the crowd palpable. Fifty years ago and now almost unimaginable! A different era: a different people!
The illustration was an effective reminder of how changed our moral world is.
When he addressed us this morning we were waiting to hear what the Pope’s Pastoral Letter would contain and we were speculating on whether or not Cardinal Brady’s period of reflection would culminate this weekend with his resignation. The debate wasn’t primarily about the dreadful abuses in Catholic institutions but it’s as if the Church’s fall from grace exemplifies the moral wilderness we’re in. If you can’t trust one of the primary defenders of decent moral values, who can you trust?
Ireland, my one and only love, where God and Caesar are hand in glove: James Joyce.
There’s nothing new under sun and so it is with corruption in high places. But there’s been in recent times a remarkable confluence of unpleasant revelations about revered establishments and prominent people which has battered our confidence and made us unhealthily cynical.
Malachi titillated us when he talked about the super injunction, a legal procedure unknown to most of us, but familiar to politicians and others with powerful images to protect. It’s the uber- injunction that prevents our discovering who’s taken out an injunction against whom. So you think it’s all out there in the public domain? You’d be surprised to know who doesn’t want us talking! Malachi refrained from the naming of names. But we reacted to each of his hints imagining that we knew who the references were to.
His focus was primarily local and mainly northern with references to sackings in the Northern Ireland Water Service over contracts; the fiddling of MP’s expenses; the falling into private hands of an expansive brown field site at Nelson Street, Belfast, formerly held by the N.I. Housing Executive as a potential site for social housing etc. etc.
Malachi put some interesting spins on the questions surrounding Peter and Iris Robinson, Gerry Adams and Cardinal Brady.
Most of us would agree that it’s self-evident that sexual behaviour between consenting adults is a matter for the consenting parties, their families and their consciences but we’re rightly outraged and possibly satisfied when the misbehaving actors are self-appointed moral guardians for the rest of us. But isn’t that kind of moral hypocrisy endemic in this country? And everybody’s commenting on it as though it were something novel. Is it not more interesting to ask ourselves why we’re so preoccupied with the sexual shenanigans when we should be paying more attention to signs of political corruption and financial chicanery? And there’ll be more to come.
Wasn’t it interesting that the revelations about Gerry Adam’s family followed so swiftly on the Robinson affair? Do you believe this was a coincidence? Are there unseen spooks and puppet masters out there?
In the ‘Adams Case’ again we’re more fascinated with evidence of sexual impropriety in his family than his denial of being an IRA leader responsible for bombings, murders and ‘disappearances’. Do we care more about one activity than the other?
Malachi speculated that the Pope’s letter would not deal with the essential issues that have led to a plague of sexual abuse in the Church namely its lack of openness and transparency and the exclusion of the laity from the Church’s governance. He suggested that the Church’s own laws were a major contributing factor to the abuse and the protection of the abusers. In one sense Cardinal Brady had acted with integrity and that was in the context of Canon Law and in particular, Crimen Solicitationis, which requires leaders of the Church to deal with priests’ offences against morality within the rules of the Church.
What can we learn from the above?
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Every institution has an unhealthy tendency towards expansion and self-protection. The importance of Transparency, Openness and Accountability in organizations including governments is paramount.
We ought to be thankful for a relatively free press. We could live in Russia where journalists are murdered with impunity or in Iran where they’re banged up without the decency of an open trial. We need a vigilant public and not one that’s satisfied with the inanities of reality TV.
Thomas Jefferson said, When people fear their government there is tyranny; when the government fear their people there is liberty.
2009 Dec 12th:Peter Emerson leads a discussion on Georgia and the Caucasus. In reporting the first post-perestroika ethnic clashes in the Soviet Union, which took place in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1988, Mosocw's daily Pravda used the headline, "This is our Northern Ireland". So when in 1990, Zurab Zhvania invited me to Tbilisi to talk about power-sharing, I readily responded. Alas, when Georgia gained her independence one year later, majoritarianism ruled and other wars soon followed: two ethnic conflicts in Abhazia and South Ossetia, and one civil war in Georgia, whereupon Shevardnadze came to power, with Zurab, now an MP, in support. In 1999, during a one-month visit to all three nations in the Caucasus, I visited Nagorno-Karabakh where a government minister showed me the justification for their recent referendum: (a Russian translation of) our Belfast Good Friday Agreement. South Ossetia followed with its own referendum, which only served to exacerbate tensions, and this led two years later to the Russian-Georgian war of 2008. Whereupon, I returned as one of Ireland's four peace-keepers in the EU Monitoring Mission.
2009 On Sat, 14th Nov, Philip Orr led a discussion on the philosphy of Irish Presbyterian, Francis Hutchison, in the 174 Trust, 174 Antrim Road, Belfast, followed by a tour of United Irelander sites in Belfast.
2006 Speech of Dr. Maurice Manning, President of the Human Rights Commission, at the New Ireland Group, Crescent Hotel, Belfast on Saturday, 10th June 2006. Human rights commissions are a growing global phenomenon. Twelve years ago there were eight human rights commissions worldwide. Today that figure is sixty-three and growing. Twelve years ago, this small number of human rights commissions existed virtually in isolation, independent of each other. Today, human rights commissions are internationally coordinated and, through the Paris Principles, have an agreed set of ground rules. These principles, agreed in 1993, are widely accepted as constituting a minimum code in respect of the competence, the responsibility, the composition, the guarantees of independence, the pluralism of methods of operation of national human rights institutions.
2006 Chairman's address AGM, BELFAST, MAY 2006. Some in the Group have been suggesting recently that we ‘get back to our republican roots’. Let me be straight and say that I think that if ‘getting back to our roots’ means platitudinizing about a simplistic 32 county solution or trying to squeeze yet more juice out of 1798, then we will just end up sounding like a nice, unarmed version of the Continuity IRA. Click here.
2003 A public meeting with George Monbiot.
1999 A discussion on Kosovo, with one Serb from Belgrade, and one Kosovar from Prishtina.
1991 The Other Talks. A public meeting in Queen's with members of Alliance (Paul Maguire), the Communist Party (Jimmy Stewart), Fianna Fail (Jim Tunney), Fine Gael (Mary Banotti), the Green Party (Trevor Sargent), the Labour Party (Dr. Noel Browne), SDLP (Sean Farren), Sinn Fein (Bairbre de Brun), the UUP (James Simpson), the Workers' Party (Gerard Cullen), and many others. The meeting used a preferendum with electronic voting on a computer and data projector and, having thus identified the consensus of all present, Petar Radji-Histic from Sarajevo said, "this would be very useful in [Bosnia]". Alas, six months later, they used a two-option referendum... and it started the war.
1986 The People's Conventions. Still 8 years before the cease-fire, the NIG nevertheless managed to get together Unionist and Nationalist - UUP and SF, not to mention Alliance, SDLP etc, as well as the UPRG and even Ulster Clubs; everyone but the DUP. This public meeting of over 200, held in the Mandela Hall of Queen's students' union, was an experiment in consensus and, by using preferntial voting and other techniques, we succeeded: "Northern Ireland to have power-sharing and devolution under a tripartite Belfast-Dublin-Agreement". It was, if you like, a mini Belfast Agreement, just 12 years ahead of its time.
